Dango-Crash Control Battle
 

I have two ideas for this mini battle, both of which are not so mini when thinking about them, just trying to decide which might actually be possible to do in a relatively short (and busy) space of time.

Hopefully will have made up my mind and made a start sometime today....

Right, I've made up my mind what I'm going to go for!

I'm going to build a cartoon Skateboarder, complete with skateboard, a scene for him to skate in, animate him doing a couple of tricks and finishing with him slamming onto his face.

I'm going to build him as basic as possible so the rigging can be simplified, still not sure if I'll manage it all but I'm sure it'll be fun trying!

Made a start on my skater this evening, doubt I'll actually animate his face too much so rigging will only be a couple of neck joints at most.
Trying to work out ways of getting it quite detailed, but with minimal stress in the rigging and painting weights stage, hopefully that'll work out....lol!

Here's where he's up to at the moment, head done, onto his body next....

Yikes, I jumped in on the wrong battle! Haha, looks awesome so far. I'll have to get a big start tomorrow morning. Still mulling concepts over in my head.

Cheers Stwert,
I wanted to keep it as simple as possible, but as always I couldn't help myself and kept going until he looked semi decent.
Chances are I'll put so much time into creating the character and the scene it won't be animated at all by the end of the year! lol

I'll do my best though.

Got some of his body done, but wasn't happy with the way the back of his head looked with it.
So added some hair to sort it out!

The SSS shader will probably be scrapped and replaced with just a painted texture as the render times would be upped a bit too much once the whole thing is animated, but will see how it goes.

Was feeling a bit too ill over the weekend to do much to my character, but got back to it today and got his arms and hands done, hopefully will have him finished soon so I can get on with the props and environment side of things.

Cool! You can get away with SSS by using a good blinn shader, faster to render too mate.

Cheers Steve, yeah will probably go down that route as it'll all be animated. So that should speed things up a bit, just trying to plan everything so it's as quick and easy to render as possible, and still looks alright.

i thought SSS didn't add much to the render time

Depends on the stttings really. All in all it doesnt add much but its a bugger to tune and can ramp up the times compared to a Blinn if your using complex lighting set ups.

And if its a 30 second short and it adds say 5 seconds per frame, thats an hours render time extra for only very little gain.

Well as this is only for a short challenge and not a demo reel etc, I think I'll go with the blinn, I don't think he'll ever be that close up to the camera anyway, probably full body in view will be the closest.
Was doing a little test to see how he'll behave when rigged, and without doing any weight painting yet it's going quite well.
Although in this pose he looks a little Zombie-like.....lol

Legs done, was a little tricky as I'm not using any imageplanes or references to model from. But I think I got the proportions about right, thanks to the grid!
And I guess as it's a cartoon character they don't have to be exact anyhow.
Just the trainers to do and I'll probably move onto his skateboard and the environment.

Hooray!
My first cartoon human is pretty much completed!

Infact my first biped of any sort really!

Was quite fun doing the trainers, not tried them before, or footware of any kind.

Am looking forward to getting him rigged and moving now, but I'll be patient and get all the rest of the modelling done first, I want to do each section of the process without straying onto anything else like texturing etc.

Skate spot 1 of a possible 5 under way (each being used for a 5 second clip of a trick, the last one being him falling).
I've already built a mini ramp for one of the clips but need to build the surrounding background for it.

The polycount for the skater and the completed board came out as around 9600, so I'm figuring if I can manage to keep the scenes at under 20000 I'll have no problems with rendering and can possibly add in some more maya hair or fur to use as grass, or some paint effects plants. I'll have to see how it goes.

I've now come up with an idea for after this little challenge so will be extending the whole animation afterwards. Hopefully by quite a bit making it a short. I have an opening sequence I want to do that isn't actually skating. And an idea for an ending, all of which could push it to spending a few months making it a full length short. Fingures crossed that all works out!